Sentiment towards moms not a reason to overturn conviction

﻿The Alberta Court of Appeal’s reversal of a jury’s verdict in the Katrina Effert case underscores society’s continued reluctance to give more than a wrist slap to women who kill their babies.

Effert was 19 when she gave birth alone in the basement of her parents’ home south of Edmonton in April 2005. She’d apparently told no one about her pregnancy and when her newborn son cried, she strangled him with her panties and threw his tiny body over the fence into a neighbour’s yard.

Effert had nine months to figure out how to handle her unwanted pregnancy. She could have had an abortion. Perhaps she found the idea distasteful. Her default position, however, was not to seek help from parents or a social agency that would have helped her with adoption.

In the end, it just seemed simpler to kill her baby, pretend he’d never existed and lie to the police about it.
As for the father of the baby, he appears to have had only a brief appearance in Effert’s life. As the Court of Appeal decision, released Monday, put it: “She was not in a long-term relationship with the father and received no emotional support from him.”

That a young man would want nothing to do with a pregnancy is hardly surprising. But in the 21st century, in a world of reliable birth control, instant information and social organizations willing to help you at the drop of a hat, it’s getting harder to accept that a frightened, panicky young woman feels she has no option but to kill her newborn.

Effert had two murder trials and a jury convicted her of second-degree murder twice. Presumably, the jurors rejected the suggestion Effert was mentally unbalanced due to childbirth at the time she coldly dispatched her baby son. In the jurors’ eyes, she was a murderer.

But in a rare move, the Court of Appeal quashed Effert’s second-degree murder conviction, which would have meant a mandatory minimum 10-year sentence, and convicted her of infanticide instead. She is to be sentenced next month. I wonder if Effert will even spend one day in jail. (There is no minimum penalty for infanticide and the maximum sentence is five years in jail.)

It’s troubling that the Court of Appeal overturned a jury’s verdict as “unreasonable” and that it criticized the Crown for being “overzealous” in its prosecution — as if defence lawyers never go over the top.

The justice ministry is reviewing the decision as it ponders whether to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

More broadly, it’s disturbing that we still have the antiquated offence of infanticide in the Criminal Code. It was introduced in 1948 because juries understandably refused to convict women of murder for killing their babies because it meant the death penalty.
Moreover, there is little proof that childbirth causes mental disturbances in women. The infanticide law was actually brought in to provide sentencing leniency for women who killed their babies because of social stresses.

But, as University of Alberta law prof Sanjeev Anand argued in a 2010 study, if the stress of child-rearing prompts some women to kill their babies, there is no reason to limit the infanticide provision to only biological mothers. Adoptive moms crack under pressure as well. So do young dads.

The paper recommends replacing the infanticide section with a gender-neutral defence of “diminished responsibility to murder.” Presumably,that would allow for sentencing flexibility.

Effert doesn’t deserve 10 years in jail. But no time in jail at all will signal that life is pretty cheap.